What is enterprise mobility and why should you care?

Enterprise mobility can be described as the change in work habits we have all seen in recent years. It originally started with employees working out of the office, using a variety of mobile devices and cloud services to perform business tasks. Now enterprise mobility refers to not only mobile workers and mobile devices, but also the mobility of corporate data. An example is a sales person who uploads company presentations, demonstrations or data to their PC and then to a cloud service provider. At a customer site, they can easily access that information for their presentation by just using their tablet.

Industry analyst firm IDC, considers mobility to be one of their third platform pillars. According to IDC’s new Worldwide Semiannual Mobility Spending Guide, enterprise and consumer spending on mobile devices, software and services will have a compound annual growth rate of 2.7% from $1.66 trillion in 2015 to $1.85 trillion by 2019. IDC also says by 2019, third platform technologies and services will drive nearly 75% of IT spending – growing at twice the rate
of the total IT market.

Changing industry compliance requirements, government healthcare mandates in the U.S., and the need for specialized devices, software and secure storage will drive healthcare providers to be the leading growth industry for mobility.

As federal/central governments embrace digital transformation, a strong component will be articulated through the adoption of mobile IT.

Retailing has already benefited from the consumer embrace of eCommerce and will continue to be a strong growth opportunity. The ability to link supply chains to customer-facing ordering capabilities, increasingly deployed in a mobile-first context, will drive consistent profitability for a wider set of smaller, more specialized retailers as they look to be competitive with mass merchant firms eager to modernize their in-store infrastructures.

Mobility is a top priority for organizations. They want to enable a mobile work force to enable productivity, connect with customers and provide better business value. Before jumping into the foray however, organizations should have a solid mobility strategy in place. Technology analyst firm Gartner, cites these factors to consider in developing your strategy:

Enterprise Architecture: Know how mobility will fit into your IT organization and make sure the resources are available to support the technology.

Technology Evolution: Understand how you will track and manage this fast-changing technology.

Mobile Applications: Be able to prioritize mobile application development so it delivers the greatest business value.

At Arrow, we can help you too. We provide partnerships and inside intelligence that will help you meet the demand of mobile technology and help you lead your customers in their adoption of it. Please join us for our Arrow Leadership Call on April 18 to learn more about mobility and innovation in the marketplace today. If you can’t attend and would like additional information, contact your Arrow representative.